Guide to running a hard waste recovery program

Hard waste initiatives collect, repair and restore useful business and household goods and then re-distribute or sell them so they remain in use for as long as possible.

It is important to consider all of the following steps on your path to success. For hard waste recovery initiatives, we have highlighted several key capabilities that are worth further consideration, as they may provide more challenges and opportunities along the way.

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Phase one: Scope and plan

Establish a baseline community need and capability

Learn about your landscape by understanding your:

• volunteers
• people making donations
• people receiving donations
• waste collection partners in your target area.

Find out their:

• knowledge and buy-in of the circular economy ideals
• attitudes and behaviours to purchasing and repairing goods.

Plan your program

Think about what kind of activities you might want to run that match your community’s need.

Articulating what drives you will also help connect others to your vision. Then you can think about the activities that will help you achieve it.

Consider some of these activities that other programs do:

• Pop-up exchange and donation events.
• Arrange collection and delivery of unwanted goods, which may include running and maintaining vehicles, running a pool of volunteer drivers, or partnering with other organisations who already have this infrastructure.
• Run a drop-off centre or warehouse to collect unwanted goods.
• Assess and repair donated goods.
• Create an inventory and store rescued goods.
• Liaise with case workers and donor organisations to assess what recipients need.
• Pick and pack relief.
• Run a physical and/or online store to sell items. Selling online sales can grow your income and reduce your reliance on grants and government funding.

Set your boundaries

To help you refine the scope of your program, you should consider what you have the capacity, and need, to run.

Whether you choose a pop-up model or run regular activities, you should take the following into account:

• The hard waste collection requirements of your local government area. Understanding these will define your collection approach and help to identify strategic partnerships. This is a key learning.
• The equipment and facilities you have access to, as well as your geographical location. Visit other warehouses first to see what you need.
• The space should be usable, secure and accessible to the community. There should be access for donation. It will help the donation process if your warehouse or collection point has parking or drop off zones with room for a car to reverse. It will also help if you have suitable shelving.
• The preferences of your local demographics for donation and purchasing.
• What kind of donations your ommunity needs and what kind of repair work is available.
• Availability of volunteers, warehouse staff and repairers.
• What to do with items that can’t be repaired. Can you, or another organisation, ethically recycle the items to keep them from landfill?
• Risk assessments for each equipment category. For example, testing electrical equipment, managing furniture.

Manage risk and maintain Memorandums of Understanding (MOUs)

Assess your risks

Understand the risk profile of your intended activities and take steps to mitigate risk through:

• appropriate insurance
• disclaimers
• management processes.

Mitigation could include:

• volunteer training
• induction
• registration or certification.

Understand your agreements

MOUs are the agreements you have with your key partners such as business donors and volunteers. They are useful in establishing clarity around everyone’s roles and responsibilities to help you minimise risk and build productive partnerships.

To ensure compliance, you should make sure your staff and coordinators are aware of any contractual and MOU arrangements relating to their facilities, tools and equipment.

Design activities to change behaviours

This whole section is a key capability as the communities’ behaviour is so important to the success of your program.

The aim of a hard waste recovery program is to encourage behaviour change in relation to waste. It helps to think about how all aspects of your activities contribute to this goal.

Your activities could:

• teach people to safely store and donate unwanted items
• teach people to repair and maintain their items
  
• encouraging people to correctly dispose of items that you can’t repair or accept
• create clear guidelines for donation to avoid dumping and contamination
• change purchasing behaviour – for example, buy second hand, not new and cheap
• use education resources to promote the above – for example with workshops and posters.

Try to design your engagement activities, programs and initiatives in a way that allows you to evaluate their usefulness and effectiveness in impacting behaviour change. This will also help you demonstrate your value to key stakeholders, including funders.

Phase two: Implement program

Set your team up for success

When engaging volunteers, have clear position descriptions that outline their roles, responsibilities and required skills.

Ensure that staff and volunteers who run events and receive donated goods have the appropriate training processes for the following:

• What you will and will not accept. Consider if you need personal protective equipment for your volunteers. If you are accepting toys, you will need to keep up to date with product recalls and safety standards. The St Kilda Mums organisation has a toy information app that you could use.

• Assessing whether goods are in acceptable condition or repairable.
• Diverting donations to more appropriate services if they aren't something you will accept.

One of the greatest challenges is unwanted donations.

Be clear and specific about what you require and what you will reject. This will manage expectations and minimise dumping. This information could be on your website or on a poster at your collection area.

Have someone meet donors so that you can turn away the unwanted items.

Think about safety. People have been known to climb into the bins, so having a plan for this will keep everyone safe.

Think about your insurance requirements, and what questions you may need to ask your repairers before they start work on items and your pickers when they select items. Think about the needs of the volunteers and staff who deal with donors and recipients of goods, and what guidance they may require.

Circular collaboration

Hard waste programs are more effective when they work together. Think of other hard waste initiatives as a supportive and informative network that can help you achieve your shared circular goals.

You can also collaborate with other circular economy initiatives that work with similar waste streams such as repair hubs/cafes and bicycle repair/recyclers.

Think about how you can promote collaboration with each other, for example:

• help each other with consistent messaging

• share knowledge of public event opportunities

• share repairers, and knowledge of repair places, parts and sales

• share knowledge of product recalls and unsafe items, especially if children may be using the product

• provide local support to broader education campaigns.

Phase three: Evaluate and improve

Use your learnings to make improvements

Program managers do well when they think about how they might improve future practice. This might mean sharing knowledge with your team or debriefing with other programs and providers. It could mean developing case studies for best practice.

When a new or unexpected donation issue arises, think about ways you can record or document the solution so that they can be repeated or applied elsewhere. Try to set up an easy-to-use document management system, so that everyone can access information quickly. There are free document management systems that you can use, such as Google Drive and OneDrive.

Funding and business obligations

Case study

Other circular economy initiative guides